Only a bit related, but I recently learned that André Weil's sister Simone was a noted philosopher and fought in the Spanish Civil War
For all that Bourbaki has been highly influential (and equally contentious) in maths, I don't actually know anyone who owns a copy of "Éléments". Is that just because I'm not French and it's actually huge among French mathematicians or perhaps because I'm just not "there" yet in my study of maths, having not got on to analysis in particular?
Obviously some ex-members of the group (Grothendieck and Serge Lang in particular) have published books that are more widely read.
We had our own for a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=nickb
That user was extremely prolific and, at that time was believed to be a group of people blessed by pg.
They have an official twitter account apparently[1] which canonically is run by the daughter of Nicolas.
[1] https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fbet...
A group of Italian intellectuals recently used a similar approach, first going by "Luther Blissett" (who was an actual footballer) in the '90s, then "Wu Ming" (Chinese for "anonymous", initially suggested to be a legendary general like Sun Tzu), and later "Nicoletta Bourbaki". The three different collectives share some but not all participants, and focus on slightly different topics - or rather a different degree of focus, with Blissett being the most generic and Bourbaki the most specific (concerning herself only with fighting historic revisionism of WW2 in Italy).
As a counterpoint, my favourite mathematician: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Arnold
You mean Nico and the Niners?
All jesting aside, I still haven’t put together the reference to Nicolas Bourbaki in twentyone pilots’ “Nico and the Niners”. Just a clever history pun or something?
aka Satoshi Nakamoto V1.0
Bourbaki's textbooks are notoriously formal, rigorous, and plain difficult.
This gave rise to a cute inside joke in the Sokal hoax [0], where physicist Alan Sokal aimed to demonstrate the lack of intellectual rigour in contemporary post-modern cultural studies and produced a nonsensical "paper" (Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) [1] that was promptly published in Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies.
At any rate, in that article, there's a footnote (to the hilarious statement that "More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism.") that reads:
> For a gentle introduction to set theory, see Bourbaki (1970).
Any competent peer reviewer reading the paper carefully would have fallen of the chair laughing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
[1] https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...